How One Nuclear Missile Base Is Battling Ground Squirrels
Malmstrom Air Force Base, in Western Montana, is home to 150 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, each tipped with a nuclear warhead. Each of these missiles is housed in an underground silo, staffed by two military personnel around the clock, and can be fired on a moment’s notice.
But in recent years, the base has been dealing with an enemy so relentless that they’ve been forced to call in outside help to defend against it. That fearsome enemy is a species of rodent known as Richardson’s ground squirrel.
The squirrels, each about a foot long and 1-2 pounds, dig extensive underground tunnel networks (they’ve been known to excavate tunnel systems more than 30 feet in length). At Malmstrom, they’ve developed an annoying habit of tunneling underneath the fences that protect each nuclear missile’s silo.
“Anything that breaches the perimeter fence will set off the motion detector,” says Gary Witmer of Washington State University and the National Wildlife Research Center, the latter a USDA-funded organization that deals with human-animal conflicts and was called in to help at Malmstrom. “Security has to go out there and see what’s going on, and they’ve been getting thousands of false alarms each year, so you can imagine how irritating it was.” The silos are scattered over some 23,000 square miles, so in some cases, simply traveling out to check out a false intruder alarm took an hour or two each way.
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/08/how-one-nuclear-missile-base-is-battling-ground-squirrels/
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